April 02, 2008

I am often perplexed when other people are aggrieved and offended, emotions I feel so seldom that I can't quite fathom how so many, on cable news and college campuses and talk radio, seem to feel them so regularly. Are they faking? Why give others the power to offend?

But I am, I must admit, offended by this:

Whatever one things of the Iraq War -- and I am not someone who thinks its detractors are being unreasonable -- it is unconscionable to make a frivolous slapstick about a war zone where soldiers and civilians are still dying, where people really are being taken hostage, where government employees and contractors -- a close friend's sister, for example -- are risking their lives, particularly when the thin and disingenuous veneer of satirizing capitalism in the war zone is offered up to deflect criticism.

April 01, 2008

I'll admit that I'd be turned off if a romantic interest read only romance novels or abortion propaganda or bridal guides, but I'm still annoyed by the New York Times article "It's not you, it's your books," which resonates enough with the readership of that paper that it tops the most e-mailed list.

Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin
problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it
chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since
Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot,
literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility.
These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding.

Here's what I want in a girlfriend: someone who doesn't choose her reading material in order to "self-brand." Considering that my name came from a character in a book that my parents both loved, that I make my living as a journalist, aspire to write books and read voraciously, I ought to be sympathetic as anyone to the idea that literary taste is "a good shorthand for gauging compatibility." But I actually don't think that it is... at least not in the way the Times article suggests.

Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as
a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels,
a Manhattan psychiatrist...

Which seems reasonable enough. But consider this:

Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes:
sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I
did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller,
a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite
all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t
even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously
bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.”
(Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)

Judy
Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the
memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult
classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of
searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish
he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that
“life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at
best.”

It's unclear that the book was actually the problem in either of these cases, but having said that, there's a term for people who end relationships based on a single book beloved of their partner: narrow-minded idiots. I say that as someone whose public reading material is never a pose, and who has read over the last couple years works by Joseph Mitchel, J.K Rowling, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Ayn Rand, Hemingway, Virginia Wolf, Ann Coulter, Dave Eggers, Tom Wolfe, Mary McCarthy, Ted Conover, E.B. White, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller, Thomas Sowell and many others.I pity any woman who tries to divine something important about me based upon whatever book I happen to carry on a given day.

So let me associate myself with the last two people quoted in the story:

Marco Roth, an editor at the magazine n+1, said: “I think sometimes
it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy
of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every
level.” Besides, he added, “sometimes people can end up liking the same
things for vastly different reasons, and they build up these whole
private fantasy lives around the meaning of these supposedly shared
books, only to discover, too late, that the other person had a
different fantasy completely.” After all, a couple may love “The
Portrait of a Lady,” but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and
the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas
about the relationship.

For most people, love conquers literary
taste. “Most of my friends are indeed quite shallow, but not so shallow
as to break up with someone over a literary difference,” said Ben
Karlin, a former executive producer of “The Daily Show” and the editor
of the new anthology “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me.”
“If that person slept with the novelist in question, that would
probably be a deal breaker — more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, therefore we’re not dating anymore.’”

Let me add that it's a good thing when people read books that challenge their politics or aesthetic tastes. In fact, I think that were I to see several books on a woman's shelf that seemed anachronistic -- Howard Zinn beside Brookhiser's Vindicating the Founders beside Camus beside The Kreutzer Sonata beside Rebecca West, etc. -- I'd find that rather appealing.

March 31, 2008

...if you're a white male, please do not loudly proclaim that Hillary
Clinton's election would be meaningless for feminism or for women
because she's only in this position because she married Bill Clinton or
because Barack Obama is the true feminist or because you don't like
her. Having talked this through with some of the women in my life, I'm
now convinced that, as a white guy, you, and I, have no idea
what it would mean to see a woman elected to the presidency. It's just
not within our universe of experience. That is not to say Clinton's run
is more or less historic than Obama's,* and it's not to say that
Clinton can't be criticized or should be supported. But 50+ percent of
this country is female, a sizable majority of the electorate is female,
and of 42 separate presidents, we've never had a woman. It matters, and
that should be acknowledged whether or not you support her candidacy.

There are so many layers of wrongheadedness to address here. One quibble is that it isn't within anyone's "universe of experience" to "see a woman elected to the presidency" because it's never happened before. Let's be charitable and assume that Ezra means that women are likely to experience the event differently when it happens... which raises the question of why he only wants white men to keep quiet. Does this mean Ezra is amenable to Jesse Jackson proclaiming that Hillary's election would be meaningless for feminism? What about Barack Obama, who is half-white -- can he make that point so long as he whispers? Do Chinese and Thai men just understand women better? Or is Ezra just less comfortable telling non-white men to shut up?

Another puzzling aspect of this post is that Ezra isn't just saying it might be meaningful for feminism to have a woman president, he is arguing that it will be meaningful -- "it matters, and that should be acknowledged." (Never mind that he simultaneously claims he has "no idea" what it would mean -- can't have that both ways!) So if the contrary argument is wrongheaded, why does he call for only men to refrain from proclaiming it? Does he think it's more permissible for women to voice wrongheaded arguments? Why does he think this?

All this bothers me so much not only because Ezra's arguments are so self-evidently ridiculous or contradictory, but because he buys into the harmful notion that people should refrain from articulating things they believe due to their race and gender.

I'm sympathetic to the notion that most men and women experience the world differently in some ways due to their gender (and that Hillary's election would matter to feminism), but so what? One way these gaps can be bridged is through conversation! A member of one group utters an argument that he believes to be true... and a member of the other group articulates why she thinks that's the dumbest thing she's ever heard. (Those who presage arguments with "... if you're a white male" probably know this process as "a dialogue.")

Ezra seems to think that rather than hold these conversations, white men should take his word for it (by way of his unnamed female friends, who I'm sure represent women everywhere). Hmmm. Why does he prefer the 'Ezra decides the appropriate bounds of civil discourse' model? And why should I?

Last Friday the New York Times asked me to comment on New Mexico Gov.
Bill Richardson's endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama for president. For
15 years, Richardson served with no small measure of distinction as the
representative of New Mexico's 3rd Congressional District. But he
gained national stature -- and his career took off -- when President Bill ClintonUnited Nations and later made him energy secretary.
appointed him U.S. ambassador to the

So, when asked on Good Friday about Richardson's rejection of the
Clintons, the metaphor was too good to pass by. I compared Richardson
to Judas Iscariot.

Matt Yglesias, who formerly pointed out that Hillary Clinton is no Jesus, still has the best take on this:

I imagine that many of the people Bill Clinton appointed to executive
offices believed, as Richardson no doubt believed, that they were
getting something more than patronage job offers. They believed they'd
been selected for reasons that had at least something to do with their
merits and that accepting didn't imply a commitment beyond service to
their country and the administration for the duration of their
appointment. Are we supposed to take it for granted that anyone who's
not prepared to back a Michelle Obama 2024 presidential campaign ought
to decline a position in Barack Obama's cabinet?

March 27, 2008

I wholeheartedly endorse this proposal to do away with nickels... and increase the value of pennies to 5 cents. (There is a little old lady somewhere whose closet full of penny filled glass jars are causing her to salivate at this post.) Note that someone has done the math, which seems to work out...

Reminds me of a real-life troll who showed up when Jessica and I spoke
at the University of Missouri a few weeks ago. The guy raised his hand
and asked us, "How come you never talk about men? You don't blog about
areas where men are underrepresented!" Exactly which areas those were,
he couldn't say...

March 25, 2008

You're a savvy man -- this much I know from your New Yorker profile -- so why, having spent $8.2 billion on the Tribune Company, are you staking its future on an "innovations" guy whose best ideas grew stale a decade ago? I refer to Lee Abrams, who I know nothing of save this memo, which I discovered by way of LA Observed. The estimable Kevin Roderick mocks it a bit but not nearly enough, for those of us who've seen the atrocious idiocy of upper management at American newspaper chains finally have written and irrefutable proof that a new generation is needed -- now -- if they are to be salvaged.

Were these interesting but wrongheaded ideas I'd cut the guy some slack. Something must be done. Any innovator is going to take risks that fail now and then.

But these ideas... can anyone be so out of touch?

NERVE TOUCHING. This is where you get people to stand up on their chair because you touch a nerve. One underused way is simply to play to passions. For example: CATHOLICS: There are a LOT of Catholics in Chicago. 2.9 million in Cookand Lake County. Easter is a big deal. I'd think a high profile Easter "celebration"
would be in order. Easter Bunny stuff is fine...but there's a more
serious side to it that isn't being captured. A devout Catholic, I
would imagine, would feel very good about this. The same thing with
Black History Month and African Americans. The coverage is there, but
we're not using a 2x4 to drive it home.

CUBS VS SOX: OK, I'm a huge fan...but I'll bet there are a lot of huge fans in Chicagoland. They faced each other again...and tied. Only Spring Training, but I think we should fan the flames. Get in the spirit. Touch some nerves.

Here I must admit that I rarely read the Chicago Tribune. Do they not cover Easter, Black History Month and the local baseball teams? If not, good idea! You should cover those things! I'd call it a core competency rather than an innovation, but what's in a name? Might I suggest, however, that it takes more to win readers than once a year panders at the most blindingly obvious time? And what does it mean to drive home Easter with a 2x4 (a metaphor that probably shouldn't be used in your coverage, b/t/w)?

LOCAL NEWS: This is THE local news source, but everything seems so generic. "Southside Boy Killed" Where...What street corner?? Touch nerves. Or, the category "Local." Huh? How about breaking it out on the web
by NORTHSIDE LOOP AREA SOUTHSIDE WEST SUBURBS SOUTH SUBURBS etc...
"Local" without more detail strikes me as old school, as no-one "owns"
it like a newspaper/TV/website can. There are ways to take assumption
of ownership to an untouchable position of ownership.

Got that? Take "assumption of ownership" to "an untouchable level of ownership". How? Name neighborhoods! Even streets! I think Abrams is onto something here. Why not get crazy specific and talk to actual residents in these neighborhoods, writing down their first and last names so that actual people would be mentioned in the paper!

MORE GENERIC: Music is such a good example. "Music" strikes me as a throwaway, whereas it could be category headings Alt Rock, Country, Broadway, etc... Touch nerves. You might have a great story about a big musical coming to Chicago, but under the heading "Music" I'll bet the show tunes fan never sees the story.

Organizing Web content by category! It would be almost as if you were "tagging" the content. There should even be a way to "search" that content.

MOST VIEWED: I think this can be expanded for the stat hungry public. Most Viewed...good. How about for the week, month, year...how about comparing most viewed to National, International etc...Maybe breaking it out by most viewed by local area.

That's actually his best idea; I'd take you through the rest but it's too depressing. Go to the extended entry if you can bear it.